I suffered with Verizon DSL for three months, and then cut my losses
and switched to cable.

The DSL was cheaper then cable, I wanted a digital satellite dish, so
I decided I would go with DSL (and so have two bills a month instead
of three). Like an idiot, I bought into the package that had a $250
cancellation fee if I had it less then 12 months.

I had no problems getting the service up and running instantly, but
the connection was really poor. Download rates were great
(60-100k/sec), but my connections would usually time out after about
200-400k. This meant that many web pages would time out when loading
giving me an error screen, and require hitting the "reload" icon
several times. Forget about downloading a big program unless you use
a download manager like GetRight, which can reconnect after each time
out. Numerous phones calls and emails and chat sessions with the
Verizon techs did not solve anything (The usual answer being to clear
my browser cache and power cycle the modem. Yeah, like I was not
smart enough to have already tried that myself).

Finally, one tech told me that this was not a problem with my setup,
but was representative of the service other people in my area received
due to my distance from the switching box. Of course, they were happy
to charge me the $250 early termination fee to get rid of my faulty
connection.

What a joke. I got reliable 49k hookups with a normal modem, which
gave a more pleasant browsing experience then the DSL due to never
timing out when loading web pages.

I felt that even pying the $250, I was saving money due to the loss of
aggrivation. I switched back to cable, and had no more problems.